About Jonathan Meese

Exploring such themes as revolution, the failures of ideology, and the role and power of art, Jonathan Meese’s wryly bombastic installations, paintings, sculptures, and performances emerge from the notion of the “Dictatorship of Art,” as he calls it. Having appointed himself its representative, Meese inserts his own image into most of his works, personifying characters from popular culture as well as those of his own devising, according himself cult status. Distinguished by an anarchic tone and Meese’s distinctive heavy metal aesthetic, the exhibition entitled “HOT EARL GREEN SAUSAGE TEA BARBIE (FIRST FLUSH)” (2011) featured paintings and prints, including a profusion of self-portraits, as well as magazine photo collages, large-scale installations, and bronze sculptures of monstrous human figures in the throes of hellish agony.